For more than 50 years, the disadvantaged children under the care of Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch suffered severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. The Child-Friendly Faith Project is organizing a reunion for survivors and their loved ones so they can find community, support and healing.

The reunion, which will take place on Aug. 31, in Amarillo, Texas, will offer survivors a chance to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. Many need our help paying for travel and accommodation expenses. To make sure all survivors have emotional support, the CFFP has arranged for a local therapist who specializes in childhood trauma to be on call.

Boys Ranch, as most people call it, is a privately funded facility begun in 1939 by Cal Farley, a professional wrestler and tire salesman who had no training in child development. Since then, the institution (which currently has a budget of $48 million) has sought donations from the community by marketing itself as a place that meets children’s needs.What really was going on was ongoing, systemic, and severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. To make matters worse, last year, Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch dedicated a dorm building to Lamont Waldrip, a man who many survivors say brutally beat children and oversaw the abusive system as superintendent for many years until he retired in 1997. Read More »

Boys Ranch has a program that provides assistance to alumni. But it’s not working well for those who were abused while growing up there.

It’s been six months since the news broke that Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch was not the place it purported itself to be.

The nearly 80-year-old institution has long claimed that it does a great job caring for children. It portrays its founder, professional wrestler Cal Farley, as a man who was forward-thinking and compassionate toward children. The privately funded, residential facility—whose 2016-17 annual report shows revenues exceeding $48 million—takes in children often left by parents who can’t or don’t want to care for them.

According to Boys Ranch’s website, “We hold true to the values set over seven decades, and still we prepare young people to become responsible citizens.”

“A sense of safety is vital to a child’s ability to reach his or her full potential.”

— Website of Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch

The Child-Friendly Faith Project has been advocating for men who grew up at Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch from the 1960s through the 1990s. The privately funded, residential facility is located outside of Amarillo and houses boys whose parents or guardians can’t, or won’t, take care of them.

The men, as child residents at Cal Farley’s, suffered ongoing physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. After leaving the ranch, many men lack skills needed to find work. They have struggled with addiction or gotten into trouble with the law. Others have committed suicide.Read More »

Abuse means, to me, using a person for whatever I want from her [or] him without asking for their agreement, without respecting their will and their interests. With children, it is very easy to do so, because they are loving. They trust their parents and most adults, and they don’t realize that they were abused, that their love had been exploited. Especially if they were forced to ignore their emotions from the beginning, they might have lost their sensibility for the warning signals.

—Alice Miller

[W]e must acknowledge that our religious communities have not fully upheld their
obligations to protect our children from violence. Through omission, denial and silence,
we have at times tolerated, perpetuated and ignored the reality of violence against
children in homes, families, institutions and communities, and not actively confronted
the suffering that this violence causes. Even as we have not fully lived up to our
responsibilities in this regard, we believe that religious communities must be part
of the solution to eradicating violence against children, and we commit ourselves
to take leadership in our religious communities and the broader society.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

—Kahlil Gibran

Children are a blessing, and that enrages the horrifying nature of those who seek only to kill and to destroy. . . . Let’s grieve for the innocent. Let’s demand justice for the guilty. And let’s rage against the Reptile behind it all.